This little piece of cyberspace is tended to by your friendly neighborhood international - financial - analyst by day and wanna - be - writer by night. Originally, this page was created to keep everyone back home (Austin, Texas - keep it weird!) updated on my new life in Germany. I hope you can learn a little about life in another culture as well as your own culture through this page, and maybe even have a laugh (usually at my expense) while doing so.

Saturday, March 01, 2008

Narnia and Formulas and... Something... (and laundry detergent)

Sometimes I feel like I'm missing something... something critical, something interesting, something obvious, something lovely... Something. It's as if I'm seeing, but with blurred-black-and-white vision, or hearing, but only a limited, muffled range of tones, or breathing, but the air is thick and stale (ok, maybe it's cause I have a cold). I think a healthy dose of Narnian air, sword-fighting and dancing in the moonlight would help.

As funny as it may seem, though, I've learned quite a bit over the past several months by spending time in Narnia and the surrounding lands and seas, and from listening to the stories of Aslan, Peter the High King, Prince Caspian, and many others. Sometimes fantasy has more to do and say about real life than reality. You can read non-fiction, religious literature and Christian philosophy* all day long, but there's nothing like a nice, concrete metaphor to make sense of life.

I've decided to copy Don Miller and take the Stance Against Formulaic Pop Christian Thought. Life's not a list of formulas, methods, rights and wrongs. There are no concrete steps that, if followed, will have the expected results. No, life is more like a song or a poem, each person singing their own voice or writing their own lines... to be combined by the Author into a harmonious symphony or a brilliant poem. Which we will neither see nor understand until the end, of course. If at all.

Just thought I'd share... it took a journey through the bright, sweet lillied-waters at the World's End to realize this... so you guys had better take it to heart. :)

On a different note, my neighbors seem to think that I supply laundry detergent for the entire appartment, which has gotten to be rather annoying. I wanted to do laundry the other day and didn't even have enough detergent for a complete load. I'm thinking of mixing flour or cappuccino powder in with my detergent... or would that be too cruel?

See, if I were a Narnian Dryad, I wouldn't even have to do trivial things such as laundry.

*not to bash Christian philosophy... certain readings have helped tremendously... it's just that it can all be so pompous and theoretical sometimes.